Graham Allison
Introduction
Churchill observed that the further back one can look, the farther ahead one can see. To help the Aspen Strategy Group look ahead to prescriptions for the U.S. in the current strategic competition with China, the organizers asked me to look back at previous great power rivalries. Specifically, they assigned me two Applied History questions:
“What are the lessons from history we should be aware of when two great powers collide?”
“What should the U.S. learn from these to shape its policies on China?”
Since these questions are discussed at length in my book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (2017), the organizers asked me to provide a succinct summary of key takeaways from the book that may be helpful in analyzing the strategic-military dimension of this relationship today. This paper begins with that overview, followed by a brief analysis of the current strategic-military competition, and concludes with provocative questions.
Overview
In brief, consider five questions:
What is the Big Idea?
Tectonics: What has happened to the relative power of the U.S. and China since the unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War?
Are confrontation and competition inevitable?
Is war—real bloody war that could become World War III—inevitable?
While today’s Washington and Beijing are stumbling toward great power conflict, could statesmen find a way to escape Thucydides’s Trap?
Out of respect for the preferred form of communication in Washington today, I begin with a tweet-sized answer to each.
The big idea comes from Thucydides. Why has China’s aspiration for a “peaceful rise,” and previous American administrations’ hope that China would follow in the footsteps of Germany and Japan and take its place as a “responsible stakeholder” in an American-led international order, been upended?1 In a phrase, the answer is: Thucydides’s Trap. China is a meteoric rising power. The U.S. is a colossal ruling power. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: extreme danger ahead. In the last sixteen cases this has happened, twelve ended in war. As Henry Kissinger has argued, Thucydides’s Trap offers the best lens available for looking through the noise and news of the day to the underlying dynamic in the relationship between the U.S. and China.
What has happened to the relative power of the U.S. and China since the U.S. victory in the Cold War introduced what most of the American national security establishment thought would be a unipolar era? In two words: a tectonic shift. Never before in history has a rising power ascended so far, so fast, on so many different dimensions. Never before has a ruling power seen its relative position change so dramatically, so quickly.2 To paraphrase former Czech President Václav Havel, things have happened so fast that we have not yet had time to be astonished.
Are confrontation and competition inevitable? Yes. As China realizes Xi Jinping’s dream to “make China great again,” it will inevitably encroach on positions and prerogatives Americans have come to believe are naturally our own. As Americans feel China growing into what we have come to think of as “our” space, they will become increasingly alarmed and push back. The hope that this is just a Trumpian detour is an illusion.
Is war—real bloody war—inevitable? No. To repeat: no. If American and Chinese leaders settle for statecraft as usual, they should expect history as usual—and that could mean war, even a Third World War. But if we recognize how catastrophic such a war could be, and understand how such rivalries have so often ended in war, strategists and statesmen can follow in the footsteps of predecessors who have risen above history as usual.
In the three years since my manuscript went to the publisher, I’ve been searching for a way to escape Thucydides’s Trap. At this point, I’ve identified nine potential “avenues of escape”—none yet so compelling that I’m ready to fully embrace it. About one thing, however, I am certain. There is no monopoly of strategic wisdom on this issue in Washington or in Beijing—or in Cambridge!
Several more paragraphs of explanation and argument may be in order. Members of the Aspen Strategy Group hardly need to be reminded of Thucydides. As the founder of history and author of The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides analyzed the causes of the war that destroyed the two great city-states of classical Greece. About that war, he wrote famously: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Thucydides’s Trap is a term I coined a decade ago to make vivid Thucydides’s insight. Thucydides’s Trap is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power (like Athens, Germany a century ago, or China today) threatens to displace a ruling power (like Sparta, Great Britain, or the U.S. today). In these conditions, both parties become especially vulnerable to third-party provocations or even accidents. Remember 1914, when the assassination of an archduke sparked a fire that ended up burning down the houses of all the great states of Europe. In the dangerous Thucydidean dynamic, misperceptions are magnified, miscalculations multiplied, and risks of escalation amplified. Extraneous events that would otherwise be manageable compel one or the other to react, triggering a vicious cycle of reactions that can drag them into a war that neither wanted.
As Thucydides explains, this dangerous dynamic is driven by three factors: material reality, psychology, and politics. At the material level, China really is rising and encroaching on positions and prerogatives Americans have come to believe are naturally ours. Many Americans see this as an assault on who we are—since for us, USA means number one. Others are still “China deniers”—refusing to acknowledge that China could be number one in any race that matters.
Psychology combines perceptions and misperceptions with emotions and identity—often producing what Thucydides called “fear” in the ruling power and “arrogance” in the rising power. (And as the Greeks taught us, beyond fear lies paranoia; beyond arrogance, hubris.) As my colleague Joe Nye has pointed out, as rivals come to see the other as an enemy, this can become a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies in which whatever either does is seen by the other as a hostile attempt to displace it or hold it down.3
Driver number three in this dynamic is politics. Within the struggle for leadership within each government, a fundamental axiom declares: never allow a significant political competitor to get to your right on a matter of national security. If he were looking for a poster child to illustrate this point, Thucydides could not find a better example than Washington today.
The dramatic shift in the tectonics of international power is a subject for a separate paper. Power is an elusive term, made even more so by the string of adjectives that have been attached to it. Yardsticks for measuring power invite debate. Nonetheless, for big picture purposes, three stubborn facts should suffice. National GDP creates the substructure of international power. America’s share of global GDP has shrunk from half in 1950 to a quarter at the end of the Cold War in 1991; it is one-seventh today and is on a trajectory to be one-tenth by midcentury.4 In 1991, China barely appeared on any international league table. Since then it has soared to overtake the U.S. in gross domestic product at purchasing power parity, or GDP (PPP)—a measurement that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) both regard as the single best yardstick for comparing national economies.5 The impact of this tectonic shift is felt in every dimension of every relationship—not just between the U.S. and China, but between each of them and their neighbors. Trade offers an instructive example. When China entered the Word Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the major trading partner of each major Asian nation was the United States. Today, the predominant trading partner of each is who? China.6
In 2015, thanks to Senator Jack Reed, I was asked to make a presentation to the Senate Armed Services Committee to provide a larger context for the committee’s review of the Obama administration’s major initiative toward Asia.7 Under the banner of the “pivot” or “rebalance,” Obama called for the U.S. to put less weight on our left foot (in the Middle East fighting wars) in order to put more weight on our right foot in Asia, where the future lies. While applauding the objective, to illustrate the impact of the tectonic shift, I suggested we imagine the U.S. and China as two kids on a playground sitting on opposite ends of a seesaw, each represented by the size of its GDP (PPP). As we were debating aspirations, we barely noticed that both feet had lifted off the ground.
Chart 1
Chart 2 summarizes a quiz I give students in my course at Harvard (formerly with Joe Nye, now with David Sanger). It asks students: When could China become No. 1? The full quiz currently has eighty arenas; the short form asks about ten. Students write their best guesses in the righthand column—answering: 2025, 2040, or “not in my lifetime.”
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